A good book at lockdown time

‘What kind of a war have you had?’ people used to ask each other at the end of the Second World War, and indeed, at the end of the First. When you think about it, the idea that war, which is horrendous for everyone, might be better for one person than for another seems somehow a bit dodgy. But it’s understandable that they thought like that.

We’ve had a ‘good’ lockdown so far. It sounds complacent to enumerate the reasons, but I shall. We have no elderly close relatives in danger. We have no small children to homeschool. We were both working from home already. We have a nice garden to sit in. Speaking for myself, I dislike shopping and other errands outside the home, so to be forbidden to do them was a massive benefit. Our main outside activity in the past has been country walks, but these were already curtailed for other reasons. It’s true that we can’t be with our children and grandchildren, but such meetings tend to be infrequent, whereas we have had a good many Facetime and Zoom chats. 

What about Church? Frankly, it had become unsatisfactory, and we had been skipping services for a while before the pandemic. By a happy contrast, since Palm Sunday (which we normally avoid) we have watched a service — livestreamed from inside an actual church — every single day, with an excellent Bible-based sermon thrown in (I’ll not say where, but you might be surprised). And as for our creativity, it has been generally recovering. It wasn’t Covid-19, but a certain event in 2016 (which I probably shouldn’t name, under anti-politics rules), that delivered a stunning blow to our power to exercise our talents.

Pride goes before a fall (as Proverbs doesn’t say), and a week ago we were feeling dangerously pleased with ourselves that we had at last sourced some lovely bedding plants, and were in the garden, just starting to plant them out, when oops, one of us slipped and broke a wrist. Anger, and fear, that we would have to visit the hospital, ensued; but even there, paradoxically, the pandemic mitigated the crisis. The hospital was half empty, treatment in A and E was (relatively) fast, and the car park barriers were permanently raised.

Nevertheless, it was a stressful moment, but as we rushed out of the house, one of us had the presence of mind to grab a parcel containing a newly published book, which had just reached the end of its three-day quarantine at the bottom of the stairs. This proved to be a godsend for the four hour wait in the car park. Absorbing, calming, and distracting. The book is The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien, and it’s an exploration of the places that inspired the creation of Middle-earth. The maps and illustrations are terrific, perhaps the most striking being the view of Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland, which probably lies behind Tolkien’s famous drawings of Rivendell.

The author is John Garth, who has won awards for his biography Tolkien and the Great War. Some readers may recall a blog of mine from a few years ago about how privileged we were to host occasional mini-Inklings sessions with our friend John: well, this is he, and this book is one of the topics discussed in our sitting room a couple of years ago, so to see it published and looking even better than we expected is very gratifying. Find out more here.

The main theme of John’s other book comes through quite strongly, and sometimes movingly, in this one, too: Tolkien the writer was shaped through and through by his experiences in the First World War. Without them, the marches, the privations, the landscapes, the struggles, and above all the intricate moral conflicts of The Lord of the Rings would not have been put before us. Tolkien spent ‘only’ a few months on the Somme and was ‘lucky’ enough to contract trench fever and spend the rest of the War convalescing and writing down the first few parts of his great Legendarium (quote marks to signal the understatement involved). His War, even with the horror and sickness it involved, was, I suppose, a ‘good War’.